“This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?”

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Insight must precede application.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’

The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction-that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist-and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.

Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out.

A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.

An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Those scientists who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

The spectral density of black body radiation; represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.